Different Social Media Plans that can help Grow your Online Business

Without establishing a social presence, your business would look like it was from the dark ages. Even mom and pop businesses from remote areas have started making Facebook accounts just to keep up with emerging trends. It’s not an option anymore, but rather a necessity for you to integrate social media into your business development plans.

Expansion of Social Media

Over the years, social media has expanded into different forms, each focusing on different types of social interaction and online functions, and each catering to a huge mass base. This expansion calls for various social media marketing plans because settling for a singular approach will not maximize the full potential of the entire social network.

Different Social Media Marketing Plans

In order to launch an effective full scale social marketing campaign, you need individual plans for each type of social media.

Social Networks – Before dwelling on other types, we need to discuss the biggest platform of them all. There’s no better example for a social network than Facebook. Social networks are among the first to offer full profile creation to its users. What makes social network platforms so popular is that all communications are in one place – timelines, walls, share updates, messages, comments, pictures, etc. With platforms like Facebook, you can connect to your followers on a personal level by answering queries, allowing them to post on your wall, getting their honest feedback, commenting on their posts, and sharing new pictures and videos about your brand.

Social News – Here, users can post news articles or stories and allow the community to vote or discuss these items. More votes mean better exposure. The most popular among these channels are Digg and Reddit. These are not sites to shout your message to your followers, but rather to interact with them. You can encourage user-submissions about your brand to get insights on how to improve your products and services and even have chat sessions with the whole community.

Media Sharing – This type of social network allows sharing of content other than text based posts. Channels like Instagram and Flicker focus on images while YouTube, Vimeo and Vine focus on videos. These channels will work best for your video and infographic marketing campaigns.

Online Reviews – A lot of companies especially service providers rely on customer reviews not just to learn about the general public’s insights. Businesses rely on positive reviews and recommendations from influential people to increase their popularity. Yelp for example has made and broken a lot of restaurants because of positive and negative reviews from its influential members.

Microblogging – Channels like Twitter are used mostly by celebrities and producers to give updates and tease about upcoming films and productions. You can use Twitter for real-time interaction as a form of customer service and push short updates to your followers

Social Commerce – This is an emerging trend and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest have starte adopting certain social commerce functionalities. Social commerce sites like Polyvore and eBay provide a place for sellers and buyers to meet. You can use these sites to directly sell your products and services

Blogging – Though blogs are mainly used for search engine optimization, fundamentally, it is rooted on interactive social publishing. You can post content about your products and services to keep your customers informed and even answer frequently asked questions.

How to Execute Social Media Marketing

The different plans mentioned above may be a lot to take in considering each social media type would need a unique approach. It would be effective but costly to hire a team of social media marketers. There are online marketing firms that specialize on various social media plans but for startups, I would suggest subscribing to web based online tools and services like HootSuite, Social Adr, UpViral, OneSoci and Qilio. It wouldn’t be that costly to pay month to month and subscribe to basic plans and when your requirements increase, you can always upgrade your membership.

Widen your reach and grow your Business with Social Media Plans

Social media has rapidly increased in popularity over the years that a lot of what it is now or how it is used would have been surprising for us during its early stages. We couldn’t have predicted back then that it would be an essential tool in every online marketing campaign. Checkout the blueprints below to learn more about how these social media plans can help grow your business.

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Social media is a vital part of every entrepreneur's online business. It's one of the easiest and…